


Grasping for the Truth

by samariumwriting



Series: Fire Emblem Trans Week [7]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Gender Confusion, Gender Dysphoria, Implied/Referenced Sexism, Nonbinary Lucina
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:42:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25449301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samariumwriting/pseuds/samariumwriting
Summary: Taking up the mantle of Marth feels easy, right.Everything that comes afterwards is more difficult.
Relationships: Lucina & Marc | Morgan
Series: Fire Emblem Trans Week [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1833433
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30
Collections: Fire Emblem Trans Week 2020!





	Grasping for the Truth

**Author's Note:**

> My final fic written for FE trans week (@fetransweek on twitter)! This event was an absolute joy to organise + see all the content for, and I'm super glad I could write for it too.
> 
> This fic is, largely, something I wrote quite a long time ago (nearly a year ago now), and it's languished as "something I didn't finish before fe3h came out" for ages, so I tidied it up, finished it off, and here it is!
> 
> This fic is quite heavy on dysphoria stuff, so if it's ever too much for you please just back out and take care of yourself <3

Lucina didn’t quite understand her feelings when she took up the mantle of Marth. She gathered up her hair, took up her father’s sword, put on garments befitting any sword fighter, and hid her face. To add to the facade, she spoke in the lowest register she could manage on the fly, under pressure.

Something felt right about it. Something she couldn’t pinpoint. It was a very spur of the moment decision, undertaken with the awareness that her father should not recognise her, and that others needed strength. That she needed strength that wasn’t her own.

Yet if that was the case, why did it feel right when she introduced herself as Marth? She’d always enjoyed the story, sure. She’d fantasised when training with Falchion that one day she would be a great hero like him. But not like this.

It was meant to be a pretence, but it all felt so real. The flush on her face when a girl called her handsome (okay, that wasn’t very new, but it felt different like this). When her father treated her like a comrade rather than a daughter. She spent several months in the guise of Marth, and with every step it became more natural.

She changed the way she walked, the way she spoke. Even when she was around people where the pretence didn’t matter, she put a significant amount of her energy into it, convincing herself it was necessary for the success of her plan. Of Naga’s plan.

Everything around her changed with it. The way people treated her was so different. There was no incredulous stare when she pulled off a tricky bout, only admiration. There was no gentle touch on the shoulder, but instead a hearty pat on the back. No man sidled up next to her for anything other than combat advice.

She felt like it was normal for these things to come naturally to her, at first. She’d always been more masculine than feminine, despite her desire as a child to have her hair long. She’s always done the ‘boy things’, but they’d just been Exalt things to her. There was no problem with that.

No, the moment that Lucina felt wrong, after months of being disguised as a man without confiding her identity in anyone else, was when Lon’qu lost so easily against her. Because she...she knew Lon’qu. She had barely interacted with him when she was younger, but she knew him. She knew why he had thrown that match. He could sense she was a woman, beyond her exterior.

And that hurt, for a reason she couldn’t fathom.

But it was fine. Her disguise was maintained. She fought her father once more. He didn’t have a single clue, and while her father had never been the sharpest person around, he wasn’t stupid. Her pretence was upheld and it was believable, and for some reason that meant far more to Lucina than she could have ever imagined.

That made it harder, however, when the facade crumbled around her. She didn’t realise how much she had been protected by the persona of Marth until the game was up. She felt so vulnerable, seeing her father recognise his mistake the moment he turned around. He no longer saw her as a man.

She dismissed it with a quick joke. She was a good actress, she said, like she hadn’t been putting her absolute all into a performance that barely mattered. The only thing the act had needed to do was to disguise her identity as a member of the royal family of Ylisse. The easiest way to do that was concoct an obvious lie. The disguise hadn’t even needed to be believable; in fact, it was better if people didn’t believe she was Marth.

So why did it feel so wrong now it was over? Now she was Marth the woman as opposed to Marth the man?

It was...concerning to think about. Lucina was worried. She had never been so unhappy in herself and in how others perceived her, and yet this was the time when how others perceived her was least important. She had a task to complete. If she failed, that was the end. So why was she worried about the depth of her voice, the cut of her hair?

She found she didn’t like it. Being a woman, that was. It had never been a problem before, so she didn’t understand why it was now. Why did it have to be an issue now, when she needed to focus on other things?

So she buried the feelings. Resisted the temptation to ask someone if they could help her cut her hair. She focused on her skills with the sword, and if she was paying extra attention to the way her father moved, and putting more weight behind her swings, then, well, who could blame her?

Never mind that she would stand in her tent every evening and stare at her body, wondering why it looked so wrong. It was fine. Her feelings here weren’t important. She had a task, and how she looked didn’t matter. How she felt didn’t matter. There was so much more she had to do, or all of this would come to nought.

The end of the war brought a sense of relief. It was over, the world was saved, her father was alive, and her younger self would grow up far more happily than she ever had.

Lucina was still miserable. At first, she attributed it to all she had lost. After all, what had happened in that future that never came to be was terrible. She’d lost her own father and mother, back in her own timeline, and her world. She’d lost her childhood, her happiness, her ability to sleep through the night without dreaming once more of Grima’s cavernous jaws, so close to swallowing her whole. But all her friends who had travelled back with her had lost that, and they seemed fine.

She couldn’t stand being seen by others. It made her so aware of the fact that the way they saw her which didn’t match up with how she wanted to be seen, and it hurt. It tore her apart inside every time she heard her own voice, every time someone called for her, every time Inigo flirted with her. It hurt in a way she couldn’t explain or understand.

It was Morgan, in the end, who figured it out. Because she didn’t know Lucina. So she just came to her one day, and said, out of the blue, “do you like your name?”

The question caught Lucina by surprise. The idea had never crossed her mind before. “My mother and father gave it to me,” she said. “It’s important to me.”

“Sure it is,” Morgan said, swinging her legs against the wall she was perched on in the training grounds. “But that doesn’t mean you like people calling you Lucina.”

Lucina grimaced. Maybe she didn’t. Morgan made a slightly satisfied noise, and Lucina could tell she’d noticed. “Maybe not,” she admitted with a sigh. Morgan was too smart for her own good.

“We don’t have to call you that,” she said. “Do you know why you don’t like it? Then I can call you something that you won’t hate.”

“I don’t know,” she said, but she did know. She didn’t like being called Lucina because it was a woman’s name. It marked her out as a woman.

“You sure?” Morgan asked. Lucina got the feeling that Morgan probably already knew exactly why she didn’t like people calling her that. She was far too intelligent and observant for her own good.

“...I’m not fond of people perceiving me as female,” she said. She’d stopped doing the lance drills that she’d been repeating over and over to get a better look at Morgan as she spoke. She’d...never said it out loud before. She’d barely been able to admit it to herself.

“Uh huh,” Morgan said. “Do you want us to call you Marth, then? That’s what you used to go by, right?”

Lucina felt awkward having this conversation somewhere so public. It felt like something she shouldn’t say out loud, but Morgan was so completely okay with it that she almost felt fine herself. It was difficult to talk about, though. It was hard to articulate her thoughts. She’d spent so long trying to chase them away that getting them out into the open felt decidedly wrong. “I don’t know,” she said.

“I’ll give you some time to think about it!” she said, hopping off the wall. “Don’t ignore it, Lu. If this is making you unhappy, you need to deal with it.”

“I...yes, you’re right,” she said. Lu. It didn’t quite fit, but it was somehow better. “Thank you.” She watched Morgan go, before moving to square up with the training dummy again. She raised her lance, and then lowered it again. Her hands were shaking. She’d been nervous, in that conversation, more nervous than combat ever tended to make her. She needed to think about this, just like Morgan said.

Lucina closed the door to her room and locked it. Then she closed the curtains. And she sat there, alone, in the darkness. Just for now, it could be her and her feelings. Nothing else.

She- no, that wasn’t right, but there was no other way to express it but that felt so wrong. He? It didn’t fit. Lucina couldn’t locate what it would be to feel like a man, or if she even wanted to feel like one. Maybe being a man would make her like Chrom, but she didn’t want to  _ be _ her father.

Inigo was different to Laurent was different to Yarne; there was no one kind of man. And no one kind of woman. But sitting here with only thoughts, all Lucina could work out that she wasn’t a woman. And she didn’t know how to express that without saying she was a man.

He (still wrong, but better) needed to think about this, and he needed to think carefully. There was something about the tone of Morgan’s voice...it made him think that this was urgent in some way. Morgan had phrased it as a question of happiness, and he thought she was probably right.

He had been unhappy. He’d barely been able to admit to himself what was making him so unhappy, but Morgan had made it so clear in only a few words. She had seen only a single aspect of all the things about himself that were making him unhappy, making him uncomfortable around others. 

He didn’t like his name because it was a woman’s name. He didn’t like the way others interacted with him because they treated him as a woman, consciously or not. He liked appearing in a certain way to others because they were more likely to see him as not a woman that way.

It hurt when his disguise had been disrupted because he didn’t want people to see him as a woman. Lon’qu’s reaction to him had pained him because he’d been able to tell that, deep down, he wasn’t anything other than a woman wearing a mask.

He opened the curtains and lay face down on the bed. He turned over. The awareness of his body was too much. The weight of his hair on his back felt wrong. This was why he’d tried not to think about these feelings too much, tried to block them out. They were so overwhelming and made him hurt in a way he couldn’t understand. He just wanted to- not exist.

But that wasn’t the right way to describe how he felt, either. He wanted to exist, but not how he currently did. He wanted to live a different life. He didn’t want to be a princess. He didn’t want to be the daughter of someone so important. He wanted to be no one. He wanted to be no one at all, travelling the continent with only mystery in his wake.

He wanted no one to be able to tell if he was a man or a woman. He didn’t want to put down any roots, form any relationships that meant people would seriously attempt to understand who he was.

But at the same time...he was sick of being lonely. He was sick of hiding. He wanted people to understand him. He wanted to form a connection with someone who wasn’t going to be stolen away by some terrible future. He wanted to live, unburdened by the things that had come before.

How could he expect to form that kind of friendship with someone if he couldn’t even understand himself?

His thoughts chased themselves round in circles. He couldn’t work out how he could ever be happy like this. He didn’t feel like a man. He could never be a man in the way that the people around him were; he just wasn’t like them. But if there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was people seeing him as a woman.

So when Morgan came knocking on his bedroom door that evening, that’s what he told her. Between a lot of deflection, Morgan telling him to be more direct about his feelings, and fiddling with the hem of his tunic, anyway. 

“So you don’t want to be a woman, but you don’t feel like a man?” she asked. He nodded. “That’s just as easy, if you want it to be. Do you just...feel somewhere in between?” He shrugged, staring determinedly at the bed. This was hard to think about. “Can I try something? Talk to me, Luce.”

“Luce?”

“Yeah,” Morgan said. “Not Luci, not Luke. I don’t think Luke suits you anyway, unless you like it. So uh, I don’t know if this is weird, stop me if I’m being too much, but see if this sounds more comfortable?”

He nodded, and Morgan continued. “Luce arrived in the past alongside the Risen, and the foe they’d left behind followed. Luce protected their family from the oncoming threat before proceeding to Regna Ferox, where they became the champion of Khan Basilio.”

They. Like when...like when there was a messenger waiting, but you didn’t know who it was, but didn’t want to offend the sender by guessing they were male. “That sounds fine.” Good, even.

“Luce it is, then,” Morgan said, smiling brightly at...them. At them. It sounded strange in their head, but maybe it would take some getting used to. Just like having a different name would, but sometimes that was how things had to be. Being called Marth had been odd at first, and became more normal with time. This was the same.

“Thank you, Morgan,” they said, returning her smile. “Thanks for noticing.”

“It’s obvious when you know what to look for,” she said with a shrug. “Now come on, you’ve been locked in here basically all day. Come to dinner with me?”

“Sure,” they said. They were starving, but they’d been so miserable all day they could barely bring themselves to move. But now, something had been lifted. Some kind of weight they’d barely even realised existed had been dragging behind them before.

They smiled. There was still a lot to figure out and even more to put into their words, but it would come with time. Time that they had, in this world with a future that stretched out into untold happiness.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed, please consider leaving a comment. I also have a twitter @samariumwriting


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